arXiv Computer Vision

LLaVAFlow: Preserving Latent Alignment Flow for Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fine-Tuning

LLaVAFlow is an information‑theoretic distillation framework designed to preserve cross‑modal alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models during visual instruction tuning. It compresses the mutual information between extracted relations and MLLM embeddings to refine alignment flow, and then maximizes mutual information between pretrained and fine‑tuned alignment flows to transfer compact alignment information. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVAFlow effectively maintains alignment flow, improving downstream performance and generalization.

arXiv AI
2d ago

VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

The paper introduces Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a method that separates multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment in multimodal large language models. VFA fine‑tunes a base LLM on multilingual text to create a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision‑aligned task vector of an existing MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs and six multilingual benchmarks show consistent gains while preserving multimodal and text‑only performance, and using less than 2% of text data narrows the performance gap to fully multimodal‑trained models.

By Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
arXiv AI
Jul 14

PivotMerge: Bridging Heterogeneous Multimodal Pre-training via Post-Alignment Model Merging

arXiv:2604. 22823v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on multimodal pre-training over diverse data sources, where different datasets often induce complementary cross-modal alignment capabilities.

By Zibo Shao, Baochen Xiong, Xiaoshan Yang, Yaguang Song, Qimeng Zhang, Haifeng Chen, Changsheng Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting

arXiv:2508. 04227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs), spanning predictive architectures to generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have revolutionized artificial intelligence through powerful cross-modal alignment and zero-shot generalization.

By Yuyang Liu, Qiuhe Hong, Linlan Huang, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Dipam Goswami, Tiantian Peng, Xialei Liu, Joost van de Weijer, Yonghong Tian
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Modality Gap-Driven Subspace Alignment Training Paradigm For Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.

By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Continual Learning with Elastic Regularization and Synthetic Replay for Federated MLLM Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 12112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across distributed networks enables privacy-sensitive adaptation to evolving data streams, yet a fundamental obstacle prevents robust deployment in dynamic environments: catastrophic forgetting, wherein sequential task updates erase previously acquired knowledge across visual, linguistic, and cross-modal representations.

By Jing Liu, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Gaoyun Fang, Chengfang Li, Yan Wang, Zhenchao Ma, Bo Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Self-Distillation as a Performance Recovery Mechanism for LLMs: Counteracting Compression and Catastrophic Forgetting

The paper proposes Self‑Distillation Fine‑Tuning (SDFT) as a method to recover performance in Large Language Models that has been degraded by catastrophic forgetting, quantization, or pruning. It shows that SDFT restores model capabilities by aligning the high‑dimensional manifold of the student model’s hidden layers with that of a teacher model, as measured by Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). The authors provide both empirical evidence of strong correlation between manifold alignment and performance recovery and a theoretical explanation linking generative capability to the structure of these manifolds.

By Chi Liu, Xin Chen, Xu Zhou, Fangbo Tu, Srinivasan Manoharan